Posted!

Join the Conversation

Comments

Welcome to our new and improved comments, which are for subscribers only.
This is a test to see whether we can improve the experience for you.
You do not need a Facebook profile to participate.

You will need to register before adding a comment.
Typed comments will be lost if you are not logged in.

Please be polite.
It's OK to disagree with someone's ideas, but personal attacks, insults, threats, hate speech, advocating violence and other violations can result in a ban.
If you see comments in violation of our community guidelines, please report them.

When last we visited the Republican plot to hijack Michigan’s 16 electoral votes in the next presidential election, it was gasping for breath in the dying light of last December’s lame duck state Legislature.

But hope springs eternal among GOP operatives eager to reverse their party’s 24-year losing streak in Michigan’s winner-take-all presidential derby — or at least marginalize the Great Lakes state’s role in picking Barack Obama’s successor.

And so it is that on Sept. 10, while the rest of his legislative colleagues were busy expelling Todd Courser and Cindy Gamrat, state Sen. Mike Green, R-Mayville, quietly introduced legislation to turn Michigan’s next presidential vote on its head.

Voters in all 50 states cast their presidential ballots not for a candidate, but for a slate of electors pledged to vote for that candidate when the Electoral College convenes the December month after a presidential election. Michigan is among the 48 states that award all their electoral votes to the candidate who finishes first in the statewide popular vote. (The two exceptions, Nebraska and Maine, account for just nine electoral votes between them.)

In 2012, all 16 of Michigan’s electoral votes — one for each of the state’s two U.S. Senate seats and 14 congressional districts — were awarded to Barack Obama, who captured 54% of the statewide vote, or 449,313 more votes than GOP challenger Mitt Romney.

Shortly after Obama’s re-election, Republicans conceived a scheme to award electoral votes in key swing states proportionally along gerrymandered congressional district lines that favored their party.

In Michigan, the plan was championed by then-state Rep. Pete Lund, a Shelby Township Republican who served three years in the House before being termed out last year. He was joined by GOP operatives in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.

Lund’s initial proposal to apportion 14 of Michigan’s electoral votes according to congressional district (with the two at-large votes going to whichever presidential candidate carried the most congressional districts) hit a brick wall when critics pointed out that it would have awarded a majority of the state’s electoral votes in the previous election to Romney, who had won almost half a million fewer popular votes than the victorious Obama. GOP efforts to abolish the winner-take-all system in other swing states also faltered.

But Lund persevered, eventually filing a bill that would have awarded nine of Michigan’s 16 electoral votes to the candidate that won the state’s popular votes and apportioning the remaining seven according to a formula based on the margin of victory.

Like his initial proposal, Lund's revised bill would have guaranteed his party’s candidate at least some of Michigan’s electoral votes in any reasonably competitive presidential election. Analysts in both parties said it would effectively take all but a fraction of Michigan’s votes out of play in most presidential cycles, effectively neutralizing the state’s voters.

Gov. Rick Snyder never explicitly promised to veto an electoral vote grab, but Democrats say they received private assurances that he was not interested in seeing Lund’s bill advance in December’s lame duck session. In the end, HB 5974 died without coming to a committee vote.

It didn’t take long for the idea to resurface in the current legislative session, however.

In March, long before their romantic liaison became the talk of Lansing, Gamrat and Courser introduced HB 4310, which essentially revives Lund’s original plan to award electoral votes by congressional district but assures that Michigan’s two at-large electoral votes would be awarded to the popular vote winner.

A week later, state Sen. Dave Hildenbrand, R-Lowell, who chairs the senate Appropriations Committee, fielded his own entry. Hildenbrand’s SB 0197 would allocate all of Michigan’s electoral votes proportionally, without regard to which candidate carried which congressional district: “Whatever percentage of voters the candidates get in Michigan is the percentage of electoral votes they get,” he summarized in an interview earlier this spring.

Now comes Green’s S.B. 489, which hearkens back to Lund’s unabashed grab for a majority of Michigan’s electoral votes even when the Republican presidential candidate loses the state’s popular vote outright. Like its nakedly anti-democratic (and anti-Democratic) predecessor, Green’s formula would have allowed the second-place Romney to claim nine of Michigan’s 16 votes in 2012.

It’s unlikely any of these schemes could be put in place in time for the 2016 presidential election, and it’s far from certain that even a watered-down plan could survive committee votes in both houses.

For starters, Snyder has repeatedly expressed the view that it would be premature for Michigan to change the rules for reallocating its electoral votes before 2020, when the next decennial census will precipitate a new congressional map (and perhaps another reduction in Michigan’s congressional delegation).

Even if Snyder changes his mind, any GOP assault on Michigan’s winner-take-all system would likely trigger a federal court challenge by Democrats, who’d argue that such a change violated the equal protection rights of Michigan voters.

Tampering with the electoral vote could also generate hostile national publicity and a popular initiative campaign to undo any vote-grabbing scheme engineered by Republicans.

Despite all these disincentives, however, the immediate future of Michigan’s electoral votes depends on what its Republican governor and a majority of his fellow Republicans in the House and Senate can agree on.

In the short run, the legitimacy of Michigan’s presidential balloting (and perhaps even the outcome of the national presidential election) lie largely in one party’s hands.